


Let Grief Be a Fallen Leaf

by boundbyspells



Category: Go On (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-14
Updated: 2013-12-14
Packaged: 2018-01-04 14:28:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1082096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boundbyspells/pseuds/boundbyspells





	Let Grief Be a Fallen Leaf

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sandyk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandyk/gifts).



Ryan King is happy, dammit. He _is_ happy. There's no possible way that he is _not_ , is there?

He's asking for a friend.

He has great things in his life. He has the proverbial great friends and great job. He is Uncle Ryan to both Anne's kids and Sonia's cats. Even if sometimes Mr K. does stuff like try to relive the first season of _How I Met Your Mother_ by getting them all to go lick the Liberty Bell--that sort of thing is... to be expected. 

And now here he sits at Lauren and Steven's wedding. Their wedding! He could not be happier. He is happy _for_ them. He's _delighted_. He's ... well, Yolanda's unexpected detour into polyamory taught them all a new word: _compersion_. It's the opposite of jealousy, being the "state of happiness and joy experienced when another individual experiences happiness and joy" per the Wikipedia page that Sonia printed out for them. He totally comperses for Lauren and Steven.

And yet. After the vows and the crying and the birdseed, he sits alone on a break from dancing with Fausta, trying to figure out "happiness" and why he doesn't feel it the way he used to. It's not a mystery to him, that he still grieves, and he knows he's quite happy by all technical definitions, but life is a little bit like sex without love or dinners without protein right now: beats no sex or food, but this is not long-haul nourishing.

Simone comes up to him.

"You're here alone?" she asks.

He glances at The Group. "I'm never _alone_ ," he says, and almost waits to see if Ghost Janie will jump into the corner of his eye, but she's been quiet lately. Maybe happiness is being content with this sort of long-distance relationship. Being content with what grace he receives and not what grace he chases.

Probably not. "Did you see that movie _Frozen_?" he asks Simone instead. "We all went. Sometimes I think that some Elsa froze not my heart, but my gall bladder. There's something in there next to my heart, that's not my heart. I know it's in there."

She blinks.

He tries again. "I just keep waiting for it to unfreeze, but it won't. I think it's where my happiness is."

"Oh, Ryan," she says in her overly compassionate throb of a voice. "It's wonderful that you want to open up emotionally. Keep trying." She squeezes his shoulder, and leaves.

He doesn't watch her walk away. It's not about her. He touches his chest, tracing his sternum through his shirt, and considers the hard spot in there. Like a lump. Is it benign or malignant? How can he get a biopsy?

#

After the wedding, while Lauren is on her honeymoon, The Group is led by a guest counselor, Yvette. They kick Yvette out after two sessions and decide to run The Group themselves. This devolves into so much chaos that Ryan decides to take a couple sessions off.

The thing next to his heart is bugging him. So much that he goes to Google his own self. This is foreign to him. Not only is he trying to open up emotionally, he's trying to Google this for himself! Carrie would be shocked.

Not surprisingly, nothing about freezing gall bladder lumps comes up. He tries to attack the question other ways: what if the lump next to his heart is not cold, but more like diamond? What if there's an impenetrable barrier holding his long-term, nourishing happiness hostage? What if it has more than just happiness hostage? What if it's also his acceptance of life without Janie?

He finds a checklist for opening up emotionally, and starts going through it. "Talking" is _right at the top_ , and he's been _doing that_ for two and a half years, so how has he not managed to crack open this stupid diamond-crystal bubble? Or is it a chrysalis?

When he talks to Owen about it, Owen says, "Maybe it's not a bubble that's going to release gas or a chrysalis that's going to release a butterfly. Maybe it's an alien. Like in the movie _Alien_. Your chest is gonna get ruptured." He draws out the word "ruptured" like something scandalous and cool is happening.

"I don't like chest rupturing," Ryan says, like that's unique to him or something.

Owen says, "I've got kind of the same thing." He doesn't look Ryan in the eyes. "I don't think it's going to open until..." He doesn't say it. Until and unless his brother... changes. One way or another.

Ryan is dismayed. And startled. And possibly shocked. He might have to go Google synonyms for more words, in fact, now that he's learned self-sufficiency on the Googling front. He is lucky. He is so lucky! The only thing standing between him and cracking this diamond bubble open is himself.

He goes to Anne next. Owen and Anne, they're kind of his mainstays. He has strong feelings of friendship for everyone in The Group, even Simone on occasion, and he holds all sorts of types of love for each of them. But Owen and Anne, they share a certain kind of loss with him that the others do not, and that kind of pain layers like bedrock.

He explains the problem to her, sitting on her couch after the kids fall asleep. She glares at him over her glasses as he talks, meaning he should really just wrap it up and let her talk now.

"By all means," he says and gestures at her.

"I'm dating someone new," she says bluntly.

"Yeah, but does she look like Rachel Maddow?" he says, and pats his hair a little.

"Pay attention," she says. "This relationship is important to me already. We spend hours talking about crap I don't even normally give a crap about."

"You sound really well-matched, I admit."

"I don't mean that I don't give a crap, I mean that I _normally_ don't give a crap. Anyway, she's a cuddler and a scientist. She gives me these long lectures about oxytocin and skin contact. And I'm telling you, King, her science is good. It's important stuff. It makes talking easier."

"Do you want me to cuddle you right now?" he asks, only half joking.

She glares at him two seconds more and then leans into him. He puts his arm around her, and they stare at the blank TV screen in silence.

He can feel it there, rising and falling with the beat of his heart, moving with the tide of his indigestion. That damned diamond lump, just waiting to be pierced by an unobtanium ice pick.

"She and I usually do this with shirts off, but don't even think about it," Anne says.

He laughs and tightens his arm.

"Some day, you're going to fall in love again," she says. "And as scary as that is, it's going to crack open a lot of things. This bubble thing of yours included."

"And it's not going to erupt an alien out of me?"

"It might," she says helpfully. "Big things, when released, release big. QED."

He is too good of a friend to turn that into a penis joke.

#

It is... not that many days later. Maybe 72, if he had to guess, but why would he?

He's been on three dates with Megan-call-her-Meg in a week and a half, and they have proceeded to shirts-off cuddling and kissing. And they've paused in the kissing, and she is telling a story about when she is college and tried to join the rugby team, and he is already thinking how hard it is to catch his breath when she looks at him.  

And in the telling, her nose wrinkles just a little, and her eyes crinkle, and she uses the word "obstreperous," and it's waaaaay too soon to tell anything definitive, but just a tiny tiny tiny crack opens in the bubble, and a tiny tiny tiny bit of that certain, ineffable lost happiness floods Ryan's system.

It's not an alien face hugger at all.

"That's good," he says out loud, touching his chest.

"What's good?" Meg says.

"Something cracked," he said.

And she takes him seriously, but not too seriously. She doesn't say "your sternum?" or even "you're okay?" Because his okayness is on his face.

"Cracks are how the lights get in," she says, the exact right amount of serious and without attribution to Cohen, and then kisses him.

He laughs, and kisses her again, and feels the crack widening, and thinks of how he's going to tell Owen and Anne and The Group.


End file.
